[Nagiosplug-devel] Plugin licensing
Ton Voon
ton.voon at altinity.com
Thu Jul 19 10:47:21 CEST 2007
On 19 Jul 2007, at 07:03, sean finney wrote:
> On Wednesday 18 July 2007 23:19:55 Kevin Menard wrote:
>> getting murkier. Given that I'm not a lawyer and don't profess to be
>> one, I'll probably just go with the consensus here. Does a Nagios
>> plugin have to be GPL'd?
Sean's response was accurate, from my point of view, so I've stuck it
on our website:
http://nagiosplugins.org/index.php?
option=com_easyfaq&task=view&id=12&Itemid=29&mosmsg=Changes+to+item
+saved
Any comments?
I was thinking that when I create a new C plugin, I usually copy an
existing one and strip out everything except the getopt handling and
the help stuff. Then the new bits are just the communication with the
external system. However, under the definitions above, this would
mean it is a derived work, so would have to be GPL'd.
Then I was thinking, maybe we could provide a library with headers
and have that under LGPL, but we use a lot of gnulib code (getopt
handling, internationalisation) which is GPL'd, not LGPL'd, so our
executable would have to be GPL'd.
If you wanted to protect some intellectual property, you'd have to
make a library which returned all the data you wanted, and then
create a plugin which is GPL'd, but only uses the library API to get
at the information.
Alternatively, to make a plugin NOT under GPL, you'd have to write it
from scratch without any external libraries which are GPL'd, which is
certainly possible, though a bit more work.
Remember, the aim of the Free Software Foundation is to make all
software free.
Ton
http://www.altinity.com
T: +44 (0)870 787 9243
F: +44 (0)845 280 1725
Skype: tonvoon
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